Actually, the word through the grapevine is that the Chick-Fil-A going up by the Harris Teeter raised a big stink about having a competing chicken restaurant. The Chipotle had to move locations. It’s now going up across from the Barnes & Noble, over by the new Whole Foods that’s being built.

As the commenter says, there’s a new Whole Foods grocery store under construction on Tunnel Road across from the Asheville Mall, on the former site of a Kmart store. There will be other new stores moving into the complex. We’ll have to keep an eye on this. I will note that, for the record, the Chipotle corporate Twitter account handler recently answered a query about plans for an Asheville restaurant by saying there were no such plans. Whole Foods background here.

Yeah, I know. You’re right — Asheville contains a large swath of people with differing views on the idea of chains and my original post does paint with a broad brush.

At the same time I think there is some noticeable overlap between people who often gripe about chains and the need to support local businesses who were very excited to have Trader Joe’s come to town and who gave the fact that it was displacing three locally owned businesses the sound of crickets. A lot of them are also cheering Chipolte, and clamoring for a Costco and a Nordstrom.

Gimmee a friggin break. Do you think anyone but a downtown merchant really gives a crap? Nowadays, people would rather see something than nothing. The tourists will take over Asheville eventually and tourists like Chipotle. And Mellow Mushroom. And Mast. Urban Outfitters? Remember what that replaced….a CVS. What are the THREE mom&pops you refer to?

This seems to be really challenging for some people to grasp, but we are a city of over 80,000 people in a county of over two hundred thousand people . . . believe it or not, there can be more than one overlapping opinion in a group that large! Trying to hunt for “consistency” in the randomly-sampled opinions of a giant group of people is about the most asinine pastime I can imagine.

If it’s true then Neo Burrito got booted from the Whole Foods Plaza: “Neo Burrito will become one of the tenants in the Whole Foods-anchored shopping center that’s under development on Tunnel Road. Yancey hopes for future neighborly relations with the natural foods chain. “We have a lot of the same values as far as how we treat our customers,” he says. “We think the demographic we’re looking for is very similar to Whole Foods.”” (http://www.mountainx.com/article/50311/Neo-Burrito-releases-plans-for-expansion)